Breakpoint

Why do so many Americans these days—especially young ones—seem to have a favorable opinion of socialism? So much so that a self-proclaimed socialist is a leading presidential candidate.

Well, perhaps they don’t really know what socialism is.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Dr. Jay Richards gives us not only a solid definition of socialism, but he gives us the history of socialism and explains its flawed assumptions about economics, government, and human nature.

Dr. Richards’s presentation was one of a 4-part online Colson Center Short Course about preparing for the 2020 election.

Register for the Next Colson Center Short Course: “Responding to Culture’s Brokenness”

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the most important abortion case since Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt. In that 2016 case, the court struck down a Texas law requiring abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of their location. The court said that such a law placed undue burdens on a woman’s access to abortion. That law would have led to the closing of about 75% of the state’s abortion clinics.

So far, the headlines about the case heard by the court this past Wednesday have mostly been about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threating Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, but there’s much more at stake in June Medical Services v. Russo.

This case involves a Louisiana law nearly identical to the Texas law struck down by the court. Note here that I am emphasizing the word “nearly.” Despite what you may hear from The New York Times and elsewhere, the laws are not identical, especially in how they would play out on the ground in their respective states.

That’s why, after a federal district court initially struck down the Louisiana law based on the Texas law precedent, the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court ruling, with the majority opinion citing two important ways the Louisiana law and the Texas law are different.

First, the Louisiana law would only affect about thirty percent of women seeking an abortion. Second, the requirements for doctors to obtain admitting privileges are less strict in Louisiana than Texas, meaning abortion providers could more easily comply with the law and fewer would be forced out of business. With these differences in mind, the circuit court concluded that the Louisiana law did not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion.

So here we are, barely four years after deciding Whole Woman’s Health, a recently remade Court is agreeing to hear a case which could overturn precedent and create significantly more elbow room for state-level restrictions. The whole thing has abortion rights advocates, shall we say, a bit nervous.

Much of the oral arguments centered around what constitutes “an undue burden” on abortion.  Chief Justice Roberts raised the possibility that the issue was a factual one. What may constitute an “undue burden” in one state, may not in another. Such factors as the number of clinics and doctors in each state, in light of the geographic size and population of the state, would need to be considered.

The lawyer for June Medical Services rejected that idea and insisted that because requiring admission privileges served no medical purpose, it would always pose an “undue burden.” That prompted Justice Kavanaugh to ask whether such a requirement would have any effect on the availability of abortion if, for instance, every doctor could get such privileges.

The lawyer repeated her answer that an admission privilege requirement serves no medical purpose. Her answer was telling. Apparently, any regulations of the abortion industry above bare minimum is unacceptable, whether or not it has any real-world impact on the availability of abortion.

Ultimately, this case is not about the availability of abortion in this one state. It’s about the nearly unique status abortion laws hold in our country. Unlike virtually every other right, such as freedom of speech or of religion, any limitation on abortion, no matter how small, is considered a mortal threat to “abortion rights” and cast as part of a “war on women.”

It’s difficult to know how the case will turn out. The Supreme Court seems always reluctant to overturn prior rulings, even closely decided ones like Whole Woman’s Health, or to issue sweeping rulings, especially about issues on which America is so deeply divided.

My prediction is that the Court will narrow the reach of that 2016 decision and lean on the factual differences between the states and the cases. While such a decision wouldn’t be the end of Roe, it could incentivize additional state-level innovations to restrict abortion. Which would mean, as we’ve often said, that our fight against the evil of abortion would only intensify, and local-level activism would only become more important.

After all, the goal is to make abortion unthinkable, not just illegal. That’s our job, not the Court’s.

Now, in what may be called the wake of the sexual revolution, expressions of sexual chaos are everywhere. What started with the separation of marriage, sex, and babies has led to aggressive attempts to indoctrinate and reorder society against the essential realities of male and female.

The list of things that Christians must reject is a long one: pornography, abortion, infidelity, abuse and harassment, gender “reassignment,” same-sex marriage, polyamory, reproductive technologies, commercial surrogacy, even “drag queen story hours.” With so much to stand against, it’s more important than ever that Christians remember what they are for.

Despite an unfortunately common mis-reputation, both within the church and without, Christianity doesn’t teach that human bodies are evils to be controlled in order to avoid sin. Rather, it teaches that our physical bodies are part of who we are as made in the image of God. As part of the created order, then, our bodies are a type of natural revelation, designed by God to reveal Himself.

Because God frequently uses physical realities to reveal and even embody the mysteries of who He is and what He wants us to know, Christians need to know the why behind the what when it comes to our bodies. Thankfully, to this end, Christopher West has made a remarkable contribution in a new book entitled “Our Bodies Tell God’s Story.”

West is best known for effectively making Pope John Paul II’s magisterial work “The Theology of the Body” accessible to the average person in the pew, especially the average Protestant. In his new book, West details a vision of our humanness, which includes our bodies as a feature and not a bug. This is no vision of sexual repression, but of how our humanness fits in God’s overarching work of redemption. On this foundation, we can answer, both for ourselves and for others, the difficult questions of our culture, about why not all sexual impulses are good or just, about what it means to be male or female, about how human sexuality was intended by God in both single and married contexts, and about how the ultimate purpose of sex and marriage is found in God’s ultimate purpose for His image bearers and His creation. After all, at the end of the day, all of the questions about sex dominating our culture right now are ultimately questions of purpose, not just morality. We are a world lost on who we are and therefore what our bodies are for.

Our purpose, as West reminds us, is revealed by God in His word and in His world. As the masterful storyteller He is, even our bodies point to the deeper realities of Christ’s self-giving love for His people who will, ultimately, be united with God in eternal communion. In the marriage covenant, God designed a way for us to act out His great cosmic drama on the smaller stage of our everyday lives together. Its significance is grounded in its imitation of the real thing: God’s covenantal love for His world.

In fact, the symbolism of marriage ties Scripture together from beginning to end. Genesis begins with a wedding and Revelation ends with one. The first points to the last and reveals the kind of relationship God wants with us through Christ.

Many Christians have long forgotten that our exalted view of marriage is not ultimately about preserving traditional moral norms or achieving personal happiness, but about God Himself. Many are called to human marriage, but all are called to eternal communion with God through Christ. This is why the Christian tradition values both human marriage and human singleness.

“When we get the body wrong,” says West, “we get the divine story wrong as well.” It only makes sense that the body and sexuality are under so much attack today.

To be clear, West approaches this topic as a faithful Catholic who maintains the teaching of his tradition. Not all Christians will agree on all the implications of his teaching (like the role of contraception), but I still say this book is must-reading for all followers of Christ who want to be theologically clear about who we are as made in the image of God. As my friend Eric Metaxas writes in the Foreword, “This bold, compelling, hopeful, and healing vision of our creation as male and female has been hailed by Catholics and Protestants alike as an antidote to the sexual crisis now plaguing the church and the world.”

During the month of March, for a gift of any amount to support BreakPoint and the Colson Center, we’ll send you a copy of “Our Bodies Tell God’s Story” as a thank-you gift.

Get your copy at BreakPoint.org

Where and how did life begin? Can naturalistic evolution account for it?

Synthetic organic chemist and Rice University professor Dr. James Tour explains that the typical naturalistic explanation for the origin of life--that there was some primordial soup, lightning flashes, then molecules came together and formed a cell, which evolved into more complicated life--is "fallacious" and "a bunch of nonsense."

As Dr. Tour tells Shane Morris today on the BreakPoint Podcast, "If any scientists" claim to know the process by which life came about, "they are lying."

In this fascinating interview, Dr. Tour explains the extraordinarily complex sets of building blocks and processes that had to come together to form life in ways we still cannot explain.

“James Tour–The Origin of Life Has not Been Explained,” Discovery Institute Video

James Tour articles at Inference Journal

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss Joe Biden's stunning Super Tuesday: What does his comeback say  not only about the Democratic Party, but the state of politics in an increasingly polarized America? Is New York Times columnist Ross Douthat right to call ours a decadent society?

John and Shane also discuss record levels of anxiety among young people over . . . climate change, as well as two stunning stories about forgiveness: Pakistani  Christian Asia Bibi forgiving her captors, and Nigerian pastors forgiving Islamist terrorists. What would the world be like without the Christian concept of forgiveness?

“The Decadent Society”: A BreakPoint Podcast interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat

The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat. Available in BreakPoint online bookstore.

“What to Do about Our Kids and Eco-Anxiety,” by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint

Recently, an Idaho contractor who cited biblical reasons for refusing to provide his social security number when applying for a business license, did more than just ask the Supreme Court to hear his case. He asked the Court to overturn a decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The decision, Employment Division v. Smith, has shaped the contours of religious freedom since 1990, especially on the state level. The case involved two Native Americans in Oregon who were fired from their job as drug counselors because they used peyote during a religious ritual.

When they applied for unemployment benefits, Oregon’s Employment Division turned them down because they had been dismissed for “work-related misconduct.” Oregon’s Supreme Court ruled in their favor saying that “the ban on the sacramental use of peyote violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause.”

The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, disagreed. The controversy is not really over the decision itself, but in the reasoning used by Justice Scalia in his majority opinion. Prior to the Employment Division case, the government was forced to show a compelling interest before it placed a burden on the free exercise of religion, and had to do so “in the least restrictive means possible.”

Scalia might have concluded that Oregon’s compelling interest was keeping drug counselors from using hallucinogenic drugs in their spare time. Instead, he re-wrote Free Exercise law altogether by saying that when it came to “laws of general applicability,” ones that apply to everyone equally, the government doesn’t have to show a compelling interest at all. “All it had to show was that religious behavior wasn’t specifically targeted by the law.”

Permitting religiously based exemptions to laws of general applicability, he added, “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

The breadth of his opinion united both conservative Evangelicals like Chuck Colson and liberal groups like the ACLU in opposition. The strange coalition urged Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, which attempted to restore the law to its prior understanding before the Employment Division decision (or, at least it would have had the Court not subsequently ruled that RFRA, at least as it applied to states, was unconstitutional.)

Most of our religious freedom conflicts today occur at the state and local level, as Christian business owners, for example, run afoul of state and local SOGI laws. If a law doesn’t specifically target religious practices, which they never do, then there is no “free exercise” issue according to the Employment Division decision.

So, people like Jack Philips or Baronelle Stutzman must instead argue that their freedoms of speech and expression are being violated. As we saw in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, that is difficult even in cases involving obvious expression, such as a custom-designed wedding cakes. Less obvious cases have it even harder.

Even worse, religious freedom is made a subset of freedom of speech, instead of the “first freedom.” In a legal sense, living by millennia-old biblical precepts is treated as the constitutional equivalent of creating sexually explicit material.

The late Antonin Scalia is considered a giant among justices, and rightly so. While he may not have intended to create this legal confusion, especially in such a vulnerable cultural moment as ours, that’s what happened. Ironically, it was a devout Catholic, whose son is a priest, who inadvertently made it harder to be a Catholic or a Protestant Christian in the public square.

While I’m not ready to pontificate on the specific the merits of the Idaho case, it’s past time to revisit and overturn Employment Division v. Smith. Religious freedom is just too important to rest on such shaky ground.

Doctors and other researchers have discovered a whole new class of psychiatric disorders among young people these days. They’ve labeled it “eco-anxiety,” otherwise known as “climate depression.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve suggested on BreakPoint that alarmist rhetoric over climate change has seriously affected the way young people think and feel, and a recent article in the Washington Post Magazine describes just how much.

The article quoted an 18-year-old from Alabama who said that “in my peer group, you just go right from talking about polar bears dying to ‘Did you see what Maya posted on Snapchat?’ Nobody has a filter to adjust . . . It’s like, the ice caps are melting, and my hypothetical children will never see them, but also I have a calculus test tomorrow.”

As the article makes clear, our rhetoric about climate change is particularly damaging to younger Americans who have “fragile psyches,” and I’m not using that description in any disparaging way. According to the NIH, one-third of all kids between the ages 13 and 18 experience an anxiety disorder. Twenty-seven percent of those in “Generation Z” rate their own mental health as “fair or poor,” and thirty-seven percent have seen a mental health professional.

When asked which current events stress them out most, climate change ranks third behind school shootings and suicides. As the head of the American Psychological Association put it, “Current events are clearly stressful for everyone in the country, but young people are really feeling the impact of issues in the news, particularly those issues that may feel beyond their control.”

One obvious way for us to respond is by talking about current events more responsibly. While alarmists such as Greta Thunberg fill our screens and social media feeds, plenty of people who are concerned about climate change, including scientists, agree that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric used to advance the issue is misleading and harmful.

Kate Marvel, a NASA and Columbia University climate scientist, told the Post that ‘We’re all going to die” message is “just not supported by the science.” While Marvel is concerned about climate change and its impact, “one can have a sense of optimism by working towards a solution.”

Unfortunately, Marvel’s kind of voice fails to get the most attention in the news or in social media, which is dominated by people telling us that we have a dozen years before the Earth reaches a tipping point and we are all doomed to possible extinction (a position, by the way, that no real climate scientist espouses).

We should also help our kids become more resilient. In the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe how parents’ attempts to promote their kids’ emotional well-being often instead makes them more emotionally fragile.

Demands for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” on college campuses are obvious examples of their fragility but are only the tip of a large iceberg. As Haidt and Lukianoff write, “the combination of helicopter parenting, fears for children’s safety, and the allure of screens” has created a generation of fragile kids who are convinced that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”

Our preoccupation with “safety” and removing all obstacles from their path has led to “a national wave of adolescent anxiety and depression unlike anything seen in modern times.”

And the “allure of screens,” that is, social media, reinforces this fragility by isolating them from other people in ways that previous generations, even millennials, were not.  And, of course, social media is also the perfect vehicle for widely spreading distortion and misinformation, such as “we’re all going to die from climate change!”

So, while the arguments about climate change will continue, we can do something about climate change-induced emotional issues. Namely, let’s be better parents. Let’s protect our kids from harm but not insist on removing every obstacle from their path. Let’s limit their screen time and expose them to rational voices.

Most importantly, let’s teach them that “all things work together for good” and that “nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.”

As I argued yesterday on BreakPoint, the spread of the coronavirus is a brutal remind of just how fragile humans are, a direct and uncomfortable challenge to our collective illusion of control. As it spreads, not only are individual lives threatened, but also the intricate and fragile web of global connections that fuel national and international economies. To ask God’s help in all of this shouldn’t be controversial at all.

That’s exactly what Vice-President Mike Pence decided to do. An official White House photo from February 26 captured the Vice-President and the Coronavirus Task Force opening their meeting with heads bowed in prayer. The photo, as they say nowadays, blew up the Internet, unleashing a tidal wave of “prayer shaming,” a term coined a couple of years ago to describe ridiculing people who dare offer their “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of tragedies like mass shootings.

One secular research website headlined the photo with this take: “Symbolic of the moral and intellectual decay at the White House, a photo shows Vice President Mike Pence and his team trying to pray away the coronavirus.” Pence and his team were “wallowing in ignorant superstition and willful ignorance,” the site continued, suggesting that Pence prays because he’s a “religious extremist.”

Another slant, this one from an out-and-proud atheist: “It’s not a joke when people say these Republicans are trying to stop a virus with prayer. What else did anyone expect? Science? Reason? Something sensible?”

One of the most viral tweets of the photo had this caption: “Mike Pence and his coronavirus emergency team praying for a solution. We are so [blanked].”

Never mind that every session of Congress begins with a prayer, as do thousands of public meetings across the country every day. Prayer is, for many today, politically unacceptable, seen as an affront to science, an obstacle to governance, and worst of all, a shameful admission that we are not in control of our own destinies.

Of course, that’s precisely the point of prayer. We are not in control. We think we are. We’ve made remarkable medical, scientific, and technological breakthroughs that have allowed us be less the victims of nature than societies in the past, but we do not control the world. The idea that we do, ironically, reveals the central belief of a technocratic worldview, one every bit as much an article of faith as any held by those who pray.

This faith lies in something quite unprovable and tentative, namely, that all human problems and challenges, whether climate change or gun violence or the coronavirus, are problems that can be solved if only we apply the right techniques, which these days are almost always political steps: i.e., passing the right laws or public policies.

In this worldview, the world and all of its complexities are reduced to mathematical models and can thus be controlled by our best ideas and efforts. All of our problems, the logic continues, can be, if not eliminated, at least ameliorated. In fact, this worldview’s central article of faith explains why those committed to it think of prayer and science as mutually exclusive options, something that directly contradicts the history of both science and many of history’s most important scientists.

This secular faith, along with the political illusions it fosters, is on full display right now by those claiming this outbreak is something President Trump or some government entity should be able to save us from. Such an inflated idea of government not only reduces the room for God in our cultural imagination, it dramatically expands the room for the state in our cultural imagination. That’s something we’ll surely regret.

In the end, placing the world on our own shoulders in this way will not grant us any more control. Instead, we’ll only find its weight too heavy, and then where will we turn?

As the psalmist said, nations may rage and people may plot in vain, but only the Lord “makes us dwell in safety.” Thank God when our leaders recognize this, and may we all join in praying for the Coronavirus Task Force, and for those political leaders and health officials around the world, for God-ordained wisdom to fight this potential pandemic.

Last August we aired a BreakPoint commentary about the growing number of frozen embryos—perhaps in the millions—produced through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned, destroyed, or used for medical research.

Not long after, John Stonestreet got an email from Marlene Strege [Streh-gee] introducing herself, her husband John, and their daughter, Hannah. Hannah, who is now 20 years old, was the first-ever frozen embryo adopted in the United States.

The Strege family joins John today on the BreakPoint Podcast to tell their remarkable story, discuss the ethical crisis in the fertility industry, and the need for Christians to support the adoption of these tiny lives frozen in our nation’s laboratories.

A Snowflake Named Hannah: Ethics, Faith, and the First Adoption of a Frozen Embryo, by John Strege

“Millions of Frozen Embryos,” by John Stonesetreet, BreakPoint

Join us at the 2020 Wilberforce Weekend, May 14-17!

The coronavirus has now spread to over 60 countries, with major outbreaks in China, South Korea, Northern Italy, and Iran. The global numbers are staggering: nearly 90,000 reported cases and over 3,000 deaths. As of Monday afternoon, there were over 90 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States, with six deaths. Of course, given the current pace of developments, these numbers are already out of date.

Naturally, people are alarmed, even frightened. Despite our recent bouts with Swine Flu and even Ebola, this one just feels different, partly because it’s obvious that scientists, reporters, and national leaders are learning on the fly with this one, partly because, at least in America, media pundits and presidential candidates are seizing the opportunity to point fingers and gain political advantage, and partly because social media is very, very good at spreading panic.

Panic, however, is almost always the wrong response. Though we know that the COVID-19 virus has spread to every inhabited continent and will soon earn the title “pandemic,” that word, as one public health expert told Bloomberg News, is too often used in movies as “a proxy for a deadly apocalyptic virus.” So, it can be misleading. Is COVID-19 serious? Absolutely. Unprecedented? Maybe. Apocalyptic? No.

According to the best numbers so far, the lethality of COVID-19 is about two percent. If that rate holds, the coronavirus would be about ten times as lethal as the seasonal flu, but we have reason to doubt it will.  For example, we just don’t know how many people have the disease. So far, the overwhelming majority of reported deaths from the coronavirus have come from the early stages of the outbreak in China, when very little was known about it, and have occurred among those already vulnerable to respiratory ailments, such as the elderly. Most who have the virus experience symptoms akin to a severe cold. So, it could be that the lethality rate of COVID-19 will drop.

Whether or not it does, the world, especially the western world, has been given a sobering reminder. One of the most embedded traits of our culture, shaped as it is by what we can call “post-enlightenment modernity,” is the wrong-headed belief that we are in control of our own destiny, via a technological and medical prowess that will, in the end, save the day.

It’s a hubris rooted in a remarkable amount of scientific and technological achievement, one in which we forget that not only is the world in which we live fallen, but that we live in it courtesy of a whole host of forces completely outside of our control. Whereas previous generations were constantly reminded of their many vulnerabilities to the various forces of nature, we control so much of the natural world that we forget, as Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, that “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature . . . There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour . . . is enough to kill him.”

We exist by the grace of God. Were He to withhold His breath of life and His creation-sustaining Word—well, that’d be it, folks.

Such a reminder of the truth about the human condition, especially coming as it has during this time of Lent when, above all, we are to remember that we are “but dust and to dust we shall return,” is a call for inward reflection.

During my “BreakPoint This Week” conversation with Shane Morris, I was reminded of a challenging book by historian Steven Keillor, entitled “God’s Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith.” In the wake of tragedies, such as 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, some Christian pundits embarrassingly claimed to know not only that God was judging by allowing these calamities, but why and who He was judging. That’s a different but just as unhelpful kind of hubris.

At the same time, the normative way the Old Testament understands calamity is as judgment, though we are rarely given a full glimpse behind the curtain of God’s intentions and reasonings. Rather than look outwards, Shane Morris suggested in our conversation, we’d do well to head the words of Jesus in Luke 13, when He was asked who God was judging in the collapse of the tower of Siloam: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

God is working in history, even allowing calamities, to accomplish His purposes. Even those of us who believe that will be tempted to bemoan the loss of control this epidemic reveals, a control we never really had in the first place.

At times like this, Christians shouldn’t be caught in the panic or the blame or the political footballing. When times are at their worst, Christians should be at their best. Already we’ve seen glimpses of this in China, where Christians who face state-sponsored persecution are taking care of their non-believing neighbors in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.

That sort of behavior only comes from knowing this world belongs to God, and that He, in the end, will wipe away every tear from our eyes.